Product Development Teams Research Articles

Stakeholder’s Perspective of Clinical Decision Support System

Clinical Decision Support System (CDSS) has potential opportunities to improve overall safety, quality and cost-effectiveness of healthcare. The CDSS has existed for more than four decades, but its adoption rate by medical communities is not encouraging even in the countries that have been a pioneer in developing them. At many sites, it was problematic, stalled in the planning stages or never even attempted. To date, CDSS is considered as a partially successful system. Several current challenges have not been adequately addressed during the development of CDSS. As per latest research, the lists of challenges are: improve the human-computer interface, disseminate best practices in CDSS design, development, and implementation, summarize patient-level information, prioritize and filter recommendations to the user, create an architecture for sharing executable CDSS modules and services, combine recommendations for patients with co-morbidities, prioritize CDSS content development and implementation, create Internet-accessible clinical decision support repositories, use free text information to drive clinical decision support, and mine huge clinical databases to create new CDSS. The preceding list has been considered as challenges due to unmet expectations of CDSS’s stakeholders, such as CDSS product development and maintenance team (product owner, project managers, system architect, system designers, system developers, system administrators, and system maintenance team), sales and marketing personnel, end-users. We found that most of the CDSS literature talked about the challenges and their details, but they do not throw enough light from CDSS stakeholders’ perspective while building and upon using CDSS. This paper describes CDSS from various stakeholders’ perspective, highlighting the challenges faced by them in owning, building, and using them.

The impact of the frequency of usage of IT artifacts on predevelopment performance in the NPD process

Responses from 152 managers from a wide range of industries were used to test a conceptual model examining the influence of information technology (IT) and non-IT resources on IT capabilities and their subsequent effects on predevelopment stage outcomes. It was found that the resources of IT infrastructure, IT embeddedness, firm's outward focus, and competitive intensity have varied effects on the frequency of usage of general-purpose and collaborative IT artifacts. Firms with higher levels of usage of collaborative artifacts in their NPD process have improved predevelopment stage performance, including the number of generated concepts and prototypes, and more efficient new product development (NPD) team collaboration.

Functional Diversity, Absorptive Capability and Product Success: The Moderating Role of Project Complexity in New Product Development Teams

Absorptive capability appears to be an appealing concept in the technology and innovation management literature. Though absorptive capability attracts researchers from a variety of disciplines, team‐level empirical research on it is scant. In this study, we operationalized team absorptive capability as a multidimensional construct involving knowledge acquisition, assimilation and exploitation. This study also explores the moderating effect of project complexity between team absorptive capability and new product success. In studying the data from 239 new product development projects using partial least squares structural equation modelling, we found that team functional diversity is a significant determinant of team absorptive capability. Moreover, regarding the relationships between team absorptive capability and new product success, we uncovered that (i) new product success is dependent on the ability to understand the acquired knowledge, and (ii) the teams appear to be more cautious in putting the assimilated knowledge into practice to the extent that project complexity increases.

Enhancing Communication Practices in Virtual New Product Development Projects

Virtual new product development (NPD) teams integrated via information and communication technology (ICT), can offer effective solutions to higher quality, service, customer responsiveness and individualized productization. Experts in NPD teams usually collaborate across the globe and across time zones by e-mail, tele- and web-conferencing, as well as other ICT, sometimes with inadequate language skills and with various ways of communicating and sharing information. Therefore, finding a shared understanding, relevant information, common language, and personal contacts across different sites may be challenging. The aim of this research was to study how communication practices are organized in virtual NPD. In addition to this, the scope was to study what kinds of competences are needed to enhance the efficiency of virtual communication in cross-cultural NPD. The authors conducted a multi-method case study of a global telecommunication company. The main findings were that members in virtual projects have different kinds of communication practices based on personal competences, habits, and preferences rather than company-level recommendations. The main contribution of this study is that virtual collaboration competences on a personal and organizational level play a significant role in enhancing efficiency in communication and when designing and utilizing communication practices. The authors' results may be used to support managerial decisions concerning practices of organizing global teams and when coordinating communication practices in complex global projects.

Collaboration between competitors' NPD teams: in search of effective modes of management control

Successful collaboration between new product development (NPD) teams maintained by competitors (so‐called horizontal NPD collaboration) requires the use of formal modes of management control that simultaneously coordinate the teams' interdependent development activities and encourage their cooperative behavior. Nevertheless, prior theoretical and empirical research suggests that formal control modes required to improve coordination may also drive uncooperative, opportunistic behavior. To help managers in horizontal NPD collaborations select appropriate control modes, this study draws on organizational theory of management control and develops a conceptual framework that specifies the impact of one partner's use of input, process, and output controls on the other partner's perception of coordination effectiveness and cooperative behavior. The results of a scenario‐based experiment with 110 expert practitioners show that managers perceive the competitor's use of input control as harmful and process control as helpful for achieving coordination effectiveness. Moreover, managers respond positively to the competitor's use of input control and negatively to the competitor's use of output control when it comes to cooperative behavior. Together, the results indicate that no single mode of formal management control simultaneously enhances both coordination and cooperative behavior in horizontal NPD collaborations.

Soaking It Up: Absorptive Capacity in Interorganizational New Product Development Teams

Prior research has acknowledged the importance of an organization's absorptive capacity—the ability to acquire new knowledge and information, assimilate, transform, and exploit it—for innovation purposes. Because innovations are usually developed by project teams, this suggests that absorptive capacity, as a construct, may also be usefully applied at the team level. Consequently, this study developed a measure for team‐level absorptive capacity, investigated the potential influencing factors, and examined its relationship to team effectiveness in terms of product innovativeness in an interorganizational context. Specifically, building on the theory of homophily and information and decision‐making theories, three factors (social‐category similarity, work‐style similarity, and knowledge complementarity between the recipient and the partner organization teams) were identified as likely antecedents of team absorptive capacity. The hypotheses were tested on data from 98 interorganizational new product development teams and included responses from team members, team leaders, and team‐external managers. With regard to the antecedents of team absorptive capacity in interorganizational settings, the results showed a significant positive association with partners' work‐style similarity and an invertedU‐shaped relationship with partners' knowledge complementarity. Social‐category similarity was not significantly associated with team absorptive capacity. We also examined whether team absorptive capacity was related to interorganizational team effectiveness and found a significant positive relationship between team absorptive capacity and product innovativeness. The study demonstrates that absorptive is indeed related to team effectiveness outcomes in an interorganizational context, which underlines the importance of team‐level absorptive capacity for product innovation management and suggests paying more attention to the lower levels of absorptive capacity.

A Clinical Residency in Sausage Making

Gaining the perspective of users is an essential goal of anyone performing human factors work in product design. Within medical product design teams, engineers have the frequent opportunity to interact with medical professionals. This embarrassment of riches in access to the user experience presents unique benefits and challenges to developing a usable product interface. This panel will provide insight into situations and perspectives of when human factors engineers work with medical device users (healthcare providers such as doctors, nurses, pharmacists, biomedical engineers) who were also part of the product development teams. The scope will include: what interactions are involved to work effectively on a project team; what was expected compared to what actually happened; effectively providing recommendations for designing usable products; what user experience / use testing methodologies were learned and performed by someone outside of human factors; and best practices for team interactions.

Nutrition-Dietetics Undergraduates as Integral Healthy Food Product Development Team Members

Nutrition-Dietetics Undergraduates as Integral Healthy Food Product Development Team Members

Friend or foe? The effects of managerial politics on NPD team communication, collaboration and project success

Much existing work on new product development (NPD) team integration takes an economically rational perspective, specifying appropriate systems, structures and interactions. Few studies however have explored the effects of politics on working relationships between technically trained managers (TTMs; e.g., research and development managers) and marketing managers (MMs) during NPD. Our results reveal that intra‐team politics has positive and negative effects on TTM/MM communication. This is important because communication positively influences collaboration and NPD success. Moreover, the effects of communication variables on these two outcome variables differ depending on whether one is a TTM or MM.

Toward the development of new product ideas: asymmetric effects of team cohesion on new product ideation

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to investigate asymmetric effects of team cohesion and team members’ relational qualification on the creativity of new product ideas.Design/methodology/approach– Structural equation modeling was conducted on survey data collected from 195 new product development practitioners in various US high-technology industries.Findings– The study suggests that creative and potentially successful product ideas include three dimensions – usefulness for customers, and novelty for customers and usefulness for the firms (i.e. enhancement efficiency and effectiveness of companies’ new product development process). By focusing on a relational aspect of new product development teams, the study shows that team task cohesion mediates the relationship between the antecedents (team members’ organizational commitment and social competency) and the three outcome dimensions of a successful product idea (novelty, usefulness to customers and usefulness to the firm). The team members’ interpersonal relationship has no positive association with task cohesion and the desirable qualifications of product ideas.Research limitations/implications– An ideation team’s socially competent members who identify with their organization are likely to be attracted to a given task. This task cohesion, in turn, enhances the creativeness of the development of product ideas.Practical implications– To generate fruitful product ideas using a team approach, companies should make sure that their new product ideation teams achieve a sense of mutual commitment to the given ideation tasks, develop a feeling of belongingness and ownership toward the firms and include members who have good social and interpersonal skills. However, the possession of strong social cohesion is not essential for the teams.Originality/value– This study provides novel insights concerning the relational aspect of product development teams assigned to the initiation phase (front end) of a new product development process.

The individual and joint effects of process control and process-based rewards on new product performance and job satisfaction

An important issue facing innovation managers is how to exercise adequate managerial control over new product development (NPD) teams in order to ensure that project goals are met. The current study advances research on this subject matter by analyzing the individual and joint effects of process control and process-based rewards on job satisfaction and four measures of new product performance. Findings from our study reveal that process control and process-based rewards can have either positive or negative effects depending on the type of performance outcome considered. Thus, process control is beneficial to new product quality but detrimental to adherence to budget, adherence to schedule, and team's job satisfaction. Interestingly, our results suggest opposite effects for process-based rewards. In terms of their joint effects, results suggest that firms should only combine process control and process-based rewards when their goal is to develop new products with high quality.

Integrating Social Knowledge and Collaboration Tools into Dispersed Product Development

Employee collaboration and knowledge sharing is vital for manufacturing organisations wishing to be successful in an ever-changing global market place; Product Development (PD) teams, in particular, rely heavily on these activities to generate innovative designs and enhancements to existing product ranges. To this end, the purpose of this paper is to present the results of a validation study carried out during an Engineering Education Scheme project to confirm the benefits of using bespoke Web 2.0-based groupware to improve employee collaboration and knowledge sharing between dispersed PD teams. The results of a cross-sectional survey concluded that employees would welcome greater usage of social computing technologies. The study confirmed that groupware offers the potential to deliver a more effective collaborative and knowledge sharing environment with additional communication channels on offer. Furthermore, a series of recommended guidelines are presented to show how PD teams, operating in globally-dispersed organisations, may use Web 2.0 tools to improve employee collaboration and knowledge sharing.

Team Foresight in New Product Development Projects

In today’s uncertain business environments, management tools, originally designed for more stable environments, no longer serve the purpose of the organization because high levels of uncertainty make the future difficult to predict entirely. In this sense, foresight, which implies both anticipating and designing the future in a proactive manner, seems to be a rising concept. Despite growing awareness of the importance of foresight capability in terms of predicting and enacting the future, empirical research on team foresight is scant. Based on sensemaking theory, this research explores the antecedents and consequences of team foresight within the context of new product development. In studying the data from 255 new product development projects using the partial least squares structural equation modeling, this study discovers that team flexibility—in terms of operational flexibility, task autonomy and resource flexibility—is a significant antecedent of team foresight. Moreover, the results particularly emphasize that new product development teams, with a proficiency in visualizing the future through making sense of technology-, market-, and project-related information, can successfully produce new products of quality in a timely manner. Managerial and theoretical implications of the study are discussed.

Cross-functional integration in the sustainable new product development process: The role of the environmental specialist

Companies in the twenty-first century are exposed to a variety of pressures to respond to environmental issues, and responding to these pressures affects several aspects of business such as purchasing, marketing and logistics. Managers increasingly view sustainability as a complement to their corporate agendas, or even as an opportunity. It is important to understand how firms integrate environmental issues into their businesses and how these integration strategies affect performance. The process of sustainable new product development (SNPD) is a key strategic focus to achieve economic and environmental sustainability. This paper examines the integration of environmental specialists into new product development teams that are composed of other functional specialists including marketing, manufacturing, and R&D personnel, and its impact on SNPD project performance across three stages: concept development, product development, and product commercialization. We empirically test our theoretical model using a sample of 219 firms from a range of business-to-business industries. We present evidence that integrating an environmental specialist into a new product team has a positive influence on SNPD project performance beyond what the traditional members of such a team would accomplish. We analyze this relationship across the stages of SNPD to obtain a clearer picture of the effects of this integration. In particular, the integration of the environmental specialist was more effective on SNPD project performance in the final stage of the SNPD process when the product was being launched; this effect is even greater for high-innovative projects.

A Proper Lack of Understanding - Towards a Theory of Creativity in Multidisciplinary New Product Development Teams

New product development requires creativity, multidisciplinarity is believed to foster creativity, and multidisciplinary new product development teams are increasingly common. However, there is little research to offer evidence for a relationship, either positive or negative, between creativity and multidisciplinarity. Traditionally, creativity has been a subject of psychological research, concerned with individuals’ capacities and achievements, and to date creative processes in organizations still tend to be viewed as the accomplishment of some highly creative individuals. Without denying the part played by individuals, in this article we explore the prospects of an interaction-based or group approach to creativity, in an attempt to explain why creativity in a new product development team may benefit from multidisciplinary collaboration. In particular, we propose ‘proper lack of understanding’ as a mechanism. Misunderstandings, if followed by a further exchange of viewpoints, are more likely to result in new ideas and new products than communication between team members who share the same knowledge base, who therefore ‘know’ already how to deal with a given problem.

Principled Structured Incorporation of Clinical Knowledge Into Strategic Development Decisions.

Efficient use of limited pharmaceutical product development resources requires integrating multiple attributes, such as efficacy, safety, pharmacology, and so on, to decide at any stage whether the development of a product should proceed aggressively or slowly or be terminated. The decision process proceeds most effectively when the knowledge and experience of a product development team are transparently and reproducibly integrated with the findings from completed experiments and trials. In this article, the authors describe an approach for quantitatively and objectively assessing evidence at any stage of development, one based on a mathematical combination of sets of pairwise comparisons. The attributes of the process and the rules for combining its elements to guide decisions are determined by the project team and other stakeholders before obtaining the determinative data to facilitate exploration of the sensitivity of a recommended action to various assumptions. Its statistical properties can be evaluated with standard statistical decision analysis methods.

A review of research and innovation in garment sizing, prototyping and fitting

Achieving well fitting garments matters to consumers and, therefore, to product development teams, garment manufacturers and fashion retailers when creating clothing that fits and functions both for individuals and for a retailer's target populations. New tools and software for body scanning and product development enhance the ways that sizing and fitting can be addressed; they provide improved methods for classifying and analysing the human body and new ways of garment prototyping through virtual product development.Recent technological developments place a growing demand on product development teams to reconsider their approach to prototyping, sizing and fitting. Significant, related changes are also being made in the fashion retail environment, including innovations in virtual fit to enable consumers to engage with fit online. For best effect in the short term, such advances need to relate well to existing manufacturing practices and to the methods that have, over many years, become embedded by practitioners into the processes involved in clothing product development and those used for establishing garment fit.The high rate of technological advance, however, places an urgent need on practitioners to change; established principles of pattern theory need to be recognised explicitly and followed consistently, otherwise, new techniques for developing and assessing products will not be able to be fully exploited. Practitioners will be pressed to adopt more data-rational approaches to product development, including adopting engineering principles into the practice of clothing product development. For example, comparisons made between the traditional two-dimensional garment pattern and the three-dimensional environment accessible through 3-D body scanning technology, provide both the stimulus and the data required to support a re-examination of how the measurements required for clothing product development should be defined. This should be coupled with a more explicit recognition of ease as a factor requiring quantification within clothing engineering. New methods of categorising the body in terms of its form also allow recognition of the restrictions of proportional theories in pattern construction; they afford promising opportunities for advancing the practices of sizing and fitting in clothing product development.

Cross-Level Identity Switching in Autonomous New Product Development Teams

The success of some new product development (NPD) teams (e.g., skunkworks) often rests on nurturing an identity that is at odds with the firm’s identity, which may hamper reintegration of employees...

The impact of cross-functional communication on absorptive capacity of NPD teams at high technology firms in Thailand

Absorptive capacity (ACAP) is an essential component for new product development (NPD) teams to effectively manage knowledge received from external sources. This paper extends the existing theory of ACAP by examining the impact of cross-functional communication on the ACAP of NPD teams at high technology firms in Thailand. The results indicate that all characteristics of cross-functional communication, including frequency, quality, and informality have direct impacts on ACAP. However, only quality and informality have a significantly direct effect on all activities of ACAP, which includes knowledge acquisition, assimilation, transformation, and application.

Conceptualizing ReX for Aggregating End-of-life Strategies in Product Development

Efforts towards a circular economy are accelerating and gaining more attention. Since product's lifecycle is mostly determined during early product development phases, it is crucial to support those phases with explicit strategic directions. This paper examines the possibility to aggregate various definitions of end-of-life (EoL) strategies in a visually compelling way. We propose a taxonomy for communication between multidisciplinary product development teams using ReX, an abbreviation for alternative EoL strategies starting with prefix ‘Re’, such as reduce, reuse, repurpose, repair, remanufacture, recycle, and recover. We construct our taxonomy based on a) EU Waste Directive, b) a systematic literature review, and c) relevant theoretical constructs. Then we discuss whether ReX allows assessing potential EoL alternatives, and steering the product development efforts. Finally, we suggest ReX for supporting decision-making when several stakeholders are involved, common language is sought for, and significant EoL related decisions are made at the early phases.